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The first Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai game for PSP gained a bit of notoriety for being one of the first 3D fighting games on Sony's portable system. In fact, it beat Namco's excellent Tekken: Dark Resurrection to store shelves by a few months. The game had the added benefit of being surprisingly good, having taken most of its play mechanics from the DBZ: Budokai games that were making appearances on the PS2 and GameCube.

It's now a year later, and Atari has brought us a sequel that's, curiously enough, not subtitled Shin Budokai 2. The "Another Road" moniker begins to make sense when you play the game, though. It feels less like an actual sequel and more like, well, another Shin Budokai game. Going from screenshots alone, you would be hard-pressed to tell the two titles apart. Even when you start playing, you'll get a serious sense of d¿j¿ vu.

Of course, it's not exactly the same as its predecessor. There's a new mode here, a few new characters here, a slightly enhanced camera over here -- that sort of thing. The largest difference is the new single-player adventure called (go figure) Another Road. Instead of being based on an existing DBZ storyline, Another Road mode takes the old Marvel Comics "What If ?" premise and runs with it. The story is set in a future where Goku has died, leaving Trunks in an unfortunate position when Babidi resurrects the powerful Majin Buu. Unable to handle the enemy himself, Trunks time travels back to the past and gathers a team of fighters to return with him to the future to challenge the pink menace. Ample voiceovers from the series' actors add to the authentic feel of the story.

Another Road is broken up into seven chapters, each containing multiple stages. Some of the stages are standard one-on-one battles, but others are a bit more involved. You begin by flying around a map that's dotted with cities. Various opponents are also flying around attacking the cities. As you might expect, you need to take out the bad guys before they destroy the towns (which all have their own health meter). To stop them, you simply fly over to them, triggering a fight. Weaker enemies will flee after one battle, but you'll have to face the tougher guys a couple of times. A couple of your teammates will also be flying around getting into their own battles.

Deal Up Your Power Level

As you continue playing, you earn Booster Cards that can be used to customize your characters' stats. In addition to enhancing the character you're currently controlling, there's some extra strategy involved in pimping out your computer controlled buddies, so don't waste all the good power-ups on yourself. This sort of character customization is a nice way to add more depth to the fighting and collecting better cards gives you motivation to play further into the game.

Even after you finish Another Road, you'll probably want to replay it again. There are multiple paths within each chapter, and several different endings. Choose the right path, and you can even see an ending in the first chapter! Granted, it's not the best ending in the game. Depending on which paths you take, you'll also unlock new playable characters, giving you even more reasons to go for that 100% completion. Just try not to be driven mad by the lengthy load times in between matches.

Aside from Another Road, there's the good old fashioned Arcade mode and Z Trial mode. Z Trial contains fighting game standards like Survival mode, Time Attack mode, and Challenge mode, where you have to perform specific techniques to win. As expected, none of these modes are as engaging as Another Road. There's also a multiplayer mode over Ad-hoc, which is nice, but it would have been a lot nicer if you could play online. Quite frankly, had online play been implemented, it would have been a lot easier to overlook the many similarities between this and the original Shin Budokai.

Luckily, one of those similarities is the fighting engine which, as mentioned before, is based on the Budokai titles. It's a relatively simplistic engine, and there aren't a whole lot of differences between the characters, but there's a decent amount of depth to be found here if you look for it. Flashy special moves are pretty easy to pull off, which is important considering that's a lot of what Dragon Ball Z's fighting is about.

Like every other DBZ game, Another Road is clearly made for fans of the series, and it doesn't worry about trying to attract anyone else to it. This is fine, and it's a solid fighting game, but even the biggest Super Saiyan wannabe might feel as though they're playing the same old game all over again. Once you get used to the "flying around on a map" bits in Another Road mode, you notice that the combat is the same as it's always been. This probably won't bother most fans, but they should at least know what they're getting into.